Under Swiss protection : Jewish eyewitness accounts from wartime Budapest

Hirschi, Agnes, (editor.). Schallié, Charlotte, (editor.). Beck, Dahlia, (translator.). Thompson, Lauren, (translator.). Yarmar, Noga, (translator.).

Summary: "This volume retraces Carl Lutz's diplomatic wartime rescue efforts in Budapest, Hungary, through the lens of Jewish eyewitness testimonies. Together with his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, the director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zürcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement, Carl Lutz led an extensive rescue operation between March 1944 and February 1945. It is estimated that Lutz and his team of rescuers issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses--annexes of the Swiss Legation. Based on interviews with Holocaust survivors in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States, this volume shines a light on the extraordinary scope and scale of Carl Lutz's humanitarian response"--Back cover.

Record details

ISBN: 9783838211091
Physical Description: 403 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.
print
Publisher: Stuttgart : Ibidem-Verlag, [2017]

Content descriptions

General Note:	"Transcriptions have been translated from German and Hebrew and are edited and condensed"--Page 18.
Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references.
Formatted Contents Note:	Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction / Charlotte Schallie -- Translators' Notes -- Editors' Notes -- Timeline -- 2. Carl Lutz In Budapest / Francois Wisard -- Context and Milestones of the Rescue Activities of Carl Lutz and His Team -- 3. Resistance Movement -- "Carl Lutz stood out like a monument---He was an example of what can be done" / Paul Fabry -- "On the nineteenth of March 1944, all of us went underground" / Mordechai Fleischer -- "We tried to save whoever we could, however we could" / Jean Greenstein -- "Every moment, every slip of paper meant human life" / David Gur -- 4. Profiles of Survivors: Interviews by Agnes Hirschi (2000--2017) -- "Klari, an Arrow Cross man is looking for you" / Klari Barna -- "During the bombardments, we hid ourselves in the pantry" / Tamas Bellak -- "Eva never spoke about her childhood" / Peter Bino -- "She refused to let the star be sewn onto her clothing" / Agnes Heffner -- "The Red Cross and the Swiss legation had retrieved us from a death march" / Ivan Sandor -- "I will never forget the horrors of the war years" / Rabbi Jozsef Schweitzer -- "The American air raid saved our lives" / Andre Sirtes -- "I was too young to understand the situation" / Eva Szirmai -- "In my breadbasket, I would smuggle letters for the prisoners" / Agnes Teichman -- 5. Testimonies -- "I did not give up trying to get to no. 29 Vadasz utca" / Irena Braun Lefkovic -- "I took the doll, [...], and we started making our way home" / Tzipporah Cohen -- "I was proud of the small yellow star" / Agnes Heller -- "Our skirts were filled with the money our wise grandmother had sewn into our hems" / Idit Hirschfeld -- "The man who changed my life" / Agnes Hirschi -- "I remember it was a house built of glass" / Hedva Katz -- "Shmulik played the accordion and we all sang Hatikvah on the ship's deck" / Naomi Katz -- "My fate was the exception" / Shmuel Katz -- "Unlike adults, I don't think we, the children, realized the situation was that of life and death" / Ester Kaufman -- "The movement began to provide us with false documents" / Mordechai Laszlo Kremer -- "I didn't know for what I was liberated. The only reason was my son" / Janos Mate -- "We were the last ones to get inside the Glass House" / Agnes Misan -- "Arthur Weisz paid with his life for having saved us" / Mordechai Neumann -- "And suddenly they called me saying that my father came back" / Miryam Palgi -- "To this day, I have not been able to understand how she managed to find my father's Kiddush cup" / Peter Pollak -- "On October 20, at five o'clock in the morning, my Holocaust began" / Alexander Schlesinger -- "I had many Christian friends who came to our home; all that changed on March 12, 1938, when the Nazis took over" / Rabbi Arthur Schneier -- "Our mother convinced us to stay with Aunt Hannah under Swiss protection" / Moshe Shavit -- "We were forced out of the bunker with tear gas and shoved naked in the snow" / Shulamit Shtauber -- "The last time I saw my mother" / Peter Tarjan -- 6. Tributes and Letters -- "Remembering 1944 and Carl Lutz" / Charles Gati -- "We were left with what is the most precious: our lives" / Steven Thomas Geiger -- "Tribute to Carl Lutz" / George Somogyi -- Letter to Carl Lutz (1945) / Geoffrey Leonard Tier -- "Diplomats are not expected to be heroes taking risks" / Michael Vertes -- 7. Appendix: Excerpts From Swiss Collective Assports NO. 1 & NO. 2.